The invention relates to optical networking devices such as cross-connect switches and, more particularly, to cross-connect switches that use micromachined mirror arrays.
The huge bandwidth of optical fibers, in combination with enormous growth of data and voice traffic, has led to a significant amount of recent development activity in the field of optical communications. Advances have occurred in architectures and network components, such as optical switches.
One approach to optical switching involves the use of micro-machined mirror arrays. Prior efforts using this approach, like those of other approaches, tend to have certain shortcomings, such as limited scalability and a relatively low level of integration.